Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Adaptation, Perception, Metaphor

In the mid-1980s I studied for my MA and D.Phil. at the
University of Sussex at a time when cultural materialism enjoyed a peak of
popularity. The volume Political Shakespeare edited by Jonathan
Dollimore and Alan Sinfield originated out of work done in the Renaissance
Studies seminar:[i]
with contributions by graduate learners and an afterword by Raymond Williams,
it was hailed at the time as a landmark text dragging Shakespeare out of the
liberal humanists’ clutches and planting him at the center of the contemporary
political agenda. Texts such as The Tempest offered trenchant
postcolonial critiques, while stage adaptations such as the Michaels Bogdanov
and Pennington’s English Shakespeare Company rendering of the histories
provided insights into Britain’s (lack of) influence in the global
socio-economic order. Implacably opposed
to the Thatcherite government, the cultural materialists envisaged a time when
literature would occupy a central position in a politicized curriculum
dedicated to creating new communities of resistance. Anyone advocating the power of the
imagination was summarily dismissed: I remember one professor branding the
Renaissance scholar Frances A. Yates as “potty,” on account of her suggestion
that the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Elizabethan writing – spearheaded by Sidney,
Spenser and Shakespeare – referred as much to the development of psychological
awareness as political consciousness.

Three
decades later the theoretical wheel has turned full circle. While politics (with a small ‘p’) continues
to occupy an important place in critics’ minds, they also admit the possibility
of imaginative transformation permitting artists and viewers alike to explore
new constructions of being. Recently
broadcast on BBC Two Scotland (with a forthcoming repeat on BBC Four over
Christmas), Lachlan Goudie’s History of
Scottish Art offers a prime example.
In a program discussing Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his
contemporaries, Goudie suggested that members of the so-called “Glasgow Group”
embraced a transmedial view of art; they not only worked with canvas and paint
but with architecture, design and handicrafts.
Through formal as well as stylistic innovations they infused their
productions with an imaginative power designed to draw viewers into close
artistic communication. This process
proved liberating: artists no longer felt constrained by the need for ‘relevance’
as they enjoyed a new-found freedom to experiment. In the next program, “Long Horizons,” Goudie
argued that artists of the Sixties such as Eduardo Paolozzi created surrealist
collages comprised of popular cultural products designed to prompt reflection
on whether the binary separating the conscious from the subconscious response
needs to be rethought. We are reminded
of the capacity of the imagination to transform belief.

What bearing
does this shift from politics to the imagination have on adaptation
studies? I recently encountered Dan
Hassler-Forest’s and Pascal Nicklas’s edited collection The Politics of Adaptation, which boldly announces its desire to
foreground “the political and ideological contexts and power relations in which
artistic adaptations take place.” They
are concerned with the ways in which globalization and media convergence
influence production and distribution, emphasizing “the importance of
adaptation as a tool of appropriation and power negotiation in racial and
postcolonial debates, as well as in terms of biopolitics and gender” (11). Through case studies the book maps “larger
ideological shifts, especially while examining the interaction between a
particular text and its cultural reception” (12). I find these statement fascinating as they
appear to recycle (adapt, perhaps?) the arguments proposed by cultural
materialists all those years ago. Yet I
would not thereby assume that Hassler and Nicklas are returning to the past;
read in conjunction with Simone Murray’s seminal work on The Adaptation Industry (2012), we understand how the visual media
has been dominated by corporate interests dictating the construction of
individual adaptations for film and television.
Noam Chomsky’s recent film Requiem
for the American Dream offers a chilling reminder about how our perceptions
of the world have been shaped by big business.
Movies and television provide one of the principal means to accomplish
this task.

On the
other hand I would query whether institutions dominate individuals as much as
they would like to believe. Müge İplekçi’s
Turkish novel Mount Qaf (Kafdağı) (2008, English translation
2012) follows a number of recent fictional works by showing how the
individual/institutional opposition is a western construct existing primarily
within the realm of the imagination. But
what if we were to cast off this belief and assume instead that we were members
of an anima mundi wherein questions
of life, death, belief or non-belief (binaries with their origins in the west)
no longer assumed any significance? What
if we approached life as a series of moments to be enjoyed on their own terms
as opportunities for adaptation so that we could enrich the lives of those
around us? This Anatolian-inspired faith
in the power of the universe might be considered “romantic” by many westerners,
evoking Keats, Wordsworth or philosophers such as Goethe with his notion of the
weltanschauung. Nonetheless İplekçi raises two points about
adaptation studies which have been largely overlooked to date. First, the discipline should acknowledge
cultural, philosophical and ideological differences that challenge several of
its most basic assumptions, especially the use of binaries (source/target text
being the most obvious). Second,
adaptation studies as a discipline should concentrate exclusively on the
literature-film-media studies paradigm but engage us on a daily basis. We spend our entire existences learning how
to adapt to new situations and new phenomena; until we build
self-referentiality into our theoretical work, the discipline will remain on
the academic margins, an adjunct to the ‘real business’ of more established
fields within the humanities or social sciences.

I do not
need to belabor the point about moving towards a more reflective construction of adaptation studies acknowledging the
capacity of the imagination to transform the world around us. Our focus of interest should extend to other
types of text – paintings, sculptures and literary fiction not necessarily
based on a specific source. Several
colleagues in Fan Studies have enthusiastically embraced this mode of analysis
by showing how individual lives have been transformed by Star Wars or the Jane Austen cycle of adaptations, to give but two
examples. I believe that adaptation
studies should draw on their insights while extending them into new avenues of
research. It’s not only films that
redefine our perceptions – any text can possess similar transformative
potential.

For this
purpose, I’ve found recent theories of mindfulness extremely beneficial. Developed by cognitive psychologists and
frequently invoked as a means to combat depression, mindfulness encourages
living in the moment; to observe our changing thoughts and feelings without
judging them. Rather we should value our
capacity to adapt and thereby work towards a better life. I’ve written extensively about the subject
elsewhere; for the purposes of this presentation, I argue that mindfulness
places perception at the center of our existences. Our response to a text promote further
adaptation as we make sense of new information or new insights (Raw, “Psychology
and Adaptation,” 89-101). We should also
acknowledge the capacity of our imaginations to express the inexpressible. This is an important point, common to all
writers and spectators at cinematic or televisual transactions, which has
hitherto received scant attention in adaptation studies. Susan Sontag drew attention several years ago
to our tendency to use metaphor to describe illness, or to use illnesses metaphorically
to sum up adverse situations. The use of
metaphor becomes a form of shorthand, a means to stimulate unconscious
associations in the interlocutor’s mind (86).
The same phenomenon also crops up in creative thinking and/or problem
workshops pitched at business communities, wherein “metaphors and analogies can
be really helpful to get […] something that is difficult to share with words” (“Impact
Innovation”). Metaphors do not require
explanation; they possess a unique capacity to stimulate and enrich experience.[ii]

What I
advocate is a model of adaptation studies that might seem superficially
retrograde, flying in the face of the cultural materialist or postmodern
thought that underpins existing theories by foregrounding the importance of
authorial intention. In cinematic or
televisual events the viewer’s or the fan’s perception assumes equal importance
as that of the director or screenwriter.
Through comparing their interpretations, we can learn a lot about how texts
are consumed in a variety of socio-temporal contexts. This model foregrounds mindful engagement: we
are not solely concerned with transmediality per se but try to make sense of our shifting reactions to texts as
well as those producing them. We engage
in mesearch as well as research, more
accurately defined as a quest for self-knowledge through scholarship (Rees). Metaphors provide a means to communicate the
outcomes of this quest to others as well as foregrounding ourselves at the
center of the creative process. The
binaries separating “artists” from “critics,” or “actors” from “spectators” no
longer matter: everyone should meditate on the relationship between perception
and ontology. It is this seemingly
endless process of discovery and rediscovery that renders adaptation studies so
endlessly fascinating.

[i]
At least one member of that group went on to pursue a successful academic
career; now the William A. Safire Professor of Modern Letters at Syracuse,
Dympna Callaghan began her career at Sussex (“Dympna Callaghan”).

[ii]
According to the performance poet George the Poet, our power to create and
savor mataphor lies at the heart of all individual and social change (“Black
Culture”).